


The Sickness

by SirJosephBanksFRS



Category: Aubrey-Maturin Series - Patrick O'Brian
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-12
Updated: 2013-10-12
Packaged: 2017-12-29 04:11:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,744
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1000713
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SirJosephBanksFRS/pseuds/SirJosephBanksFRS
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stephen Maturin ponders the nature of his attachment to Diana Villiers</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Sickness

Stephen Maturin sat gazing at the wine glass he had just poured half full of laudanum and sighed, looked at the note Diana had left for him in Clarges Street once again, stuffed it back into his waistcoat pocket and put the stopper in the case bottle of laudanum.

He had a disease. His obsession, his mania, his need for possession of Diana: this was not love, though he believed it love, he called it love. This was a sickness, a sickness he was completely powerless to overcome or to even treat beyond making himself insensible with the strongest opiates and still he yearned. Pain dulled was still pain. He had to be completely insensate not to register it and still she was there, in the back of his consciousness and his dreams and he had awakened more than once, his face wet from the tears he had shed once again in losing her forever in his dreams, with no memory of the dream whatever except the sense of terrible loss.

It had almost destroyed everything, this disease. He had been ready to kill Jack Aubrey because of it and that thought alone appalled him. He could dress it up in whatever twisted logic and rhetoric about an offence against his honour and rash words but he realized with a chill that ran through him that his jealousy, the emotion he claimed to not be in possession of to the extent of one iota, would have seen him clear to kill the person he cared more for than anyone else on earth over a woman who had made it explicitly manifest she had no interest at all in him as a lover or suitor.

Diana did not love him. She held no attraction to him whatever. She liked him inasmuch as she was capable of liking anyone, which truth be told did not seem to be much at all. Stephen did not take that personally, for it was not personal. She was one of the least affectionate beings he had ever known, which made any expression of her happiness in seeing him all the more gratifying. He thought she would be a completely indifferent wife to any man, really not much of a wife at all in any usual sense of the word, but he would not be much a of a husband either, truth be told. Stephen knew all of this and it mattered not one whit. He had fallen for her the very first time he had ever laid eyes on her and she would marry him or he would die in the attempt. There was much he admired in Diana and much he did not but what had resonated very deeply with him was that he would never rest easy until he could introduce Diana Villiers to the world at large as Mrs. Stephen Maturin. Virtually nothing was of more significance to him, which he knew was his sickness.

Why? That was the question he could not answer, the fact that defied all reason. He had attempted to make himself desist over and over and failed always. He was abject with Diana, odiously so in his mansuetude. He wondered that Diana had not repeatedly thrown him out on his ear in disgust. He had seen contempt in her face followed by an almost cruel pleasure at the lengths he would go to keep her company, to please her. He had seen her initial pleasure in how easy it was to manipulate him to get what she wanted change over time to something that was a mixture of boredom and contempt, for it required no art nor skill on her part and Diana was full of art and skill and he and his material assets were a poor challenge and a poor prize for her talents. She could charm a jewel from a Rajah’s turban and here he was, bringing her a nosegay of violets and asking her if there were anything he could do for her before he saw her again. The one length to which he would not go was actually asserting anything pejorative about Jack no matter how she pushed or led him. He would assent to some of the many aspersions she cast in his presence about Jack (how he hated himself for that; he had never understood the flagellant better than in those moments), he would mostly demur and say nothing as she blackguarded Jack before him, though he noticed occasionally that she was looking closely at his face to see his reaction and he had sought to make his face as bland and distracted as possible, hoping that she would tire of this game. The problem was that it was the only iteration of "What Can I Make Stephen Maturin Do?" that held any challenge for Diana, given that Stephen would do virtually anything else that had ever occurred to her. It reminded him of an incident during his childhood in Catalunya, seeing his cousin, Laetitia, an extremely beautiful little girl, who was torturing a frog until finally bored with the game, she had killed it and flung its corpse away and Stephen now felt as though he were that frog and Diana was his cousin, but unlike the frog, he would not struggle to get away. He would jump back into her hand over and over.

He had thought initially that it was his virile principle at play. Then he and Jack had become lovers and his carnal appetites were more than satisfied. Yes, he still wanted to make love to Diana Villiers, he still had erotic dreams and lusted after her, but this was much more. He would never accept merely being her lover, not that she would ever have had any interest in such a proposition. He could accept a _mariage a blanc_ with her, a marriage in name only with no sexual relations at all, though it would pain him greatly. He would settle for that. The one non-negotiable term was that he would not rest until Diana Villiers was legally married to him and he believed it with all his heart even as he despaired that Diana Villiers would eventually become Mrs. Stephen Maturin. For any problem Diana possessed or would ever possess he could conceive of only one solution and that solution was to marry him and he could not even see the disingenuity of it all, so steeped was he in his disease.

Women as such held very little interest for him. He knew that he was unusual in how very limited his sexual attractions were. Truth be told, there had only been three intense instances in his life: Mona, Diana and Jack. Jack was most certainly only because of some very deviant chain of causality. His relations with Jack were the only attachment he had ever experienced that had given him no pain from his beloved whatever. But his great love for Jack and his erotic attachment, no matter how fulfilling, were no cure for the disease that ailed him. No amount of intimacy with Jack amounted to a tinker's dam as far as his feelings for Diana were concerned.

Stephen sat alone in his room and tried to tease out by reason what exactly was driving his obsession with Diana. Yes, she was incredibly beautiful but she was not the first extremely beautiful woman he had ever met and he had never fallen in love to this extent with the others. He loved her dash, her bearing, her spirit, her posture, her jauntiness and her nonchalance. He loved that there was nothing missish about her whatever. But more than that, more than anything, he realised that he loved seeing the expressions on the faces of other men when he walked with her on his arm.

He loathed the fact that it mattered to him so much, he loathed what it said about him to himself, that he cared so much of how he appeared in the eyes of others when he had been convinced that he was nearly incapable of taking any notice whatever in what others thought of him with regard to that which was superficial. His disinterest was yet another point of pride for him. His professional reputation, sure, his honour, nothing was more paramount as others viewed him. But this almost showing away via Diana's person was far beneath him; it was pathetic and verging on being despicable but nonetheless, it filled him with a pride he had never known, never even conceived of and Stephen Maturin was an exceptionally proud man.

St. Augustine said that pride changed angels into devils and Stephen had more pride than Lucifer himself. Diana was an exceptionally beautiful woman and gazing upon her filled him with the greatest pleasure but he felt no greater pleasure ever than to see the eyes of other men and their envy as they looked from him to Diana and back to him again. It was difficult to even name the sentiment -- a mixture of triumph and deep satisfaction to see the looks of complete disbelief, naked envy, wonder and admiration directed at him having Diana on his arm. Suddenly, he was no longer merely a small, ugly nondescript man of no interest, no birth and no account to strangers, for the gaze of virtually every man he would ever see changed, seeing him with Diana, save Jack Aubrey. With Diana on his arm, leaning towards him and whispering in his ear, even his own long time friends and acquaintances saw him differently, accorded him an admiration that he had never known, an experience, he thought which must be similar to being made a baronet or receiving the Order of the Bath. With Diana beside him, he was obviously accomplished, obviously a man of significant substance and worth and Diana Villiers was the living and breathing insignia attesting to that fact. Worst of all, he realised with a pang, that he saw himself with those stranger’s eyes when Diana was on his arm and thus his sickness was utterly incurable.

He took the letter out of his pocket and read the end of it again.

_I shall not see you again, Stephen. Forgive me, but it would not answer. Think of me kindly, for your friendship is very dear to me._

 

He crumpled it into his pocket, lifted the glass and drained the bitter draught in one swallow and walked to his bed.


End file.
